PLANET EARTH poem in online poetry collection

The intergalactic arena
Is no frog pond.
Baby cute is not what makes the grade.
With the right stuff,
Your planet can be a contender.
But don't delude yourselves.
Be realistic.
So, objectively,
The home crowd sentiment apart,
How do we shape up?
In some respects,
Our favorite planet lags.
On planet Earth, for example,
The exploitation of babies for cuisine
Has barely been initiated.
Assassination is not yet corporate.
Our major famines
Are accidental rather than engineered.
In economics,
We are mere beginners.
Our capitalism, for example,
Is bagatelle-light.
We would be laughed at if we sought comparison
With Gloran Jarbot, also known as Arachtop IV,
Where the rich eat the feet of the poor.
We would seem similarly risible
If set against the fiduciary logic
Of Grilgrist Traven,
Ninth planet of the brightstar Tring,
Where the affluent old
Purchase the eyes of the newborn.
On the social system level
We are naive, gauche and,
To be frank,
Laughable.
But, still, we are in the game.
We have,
As our first advantage,
Our amateur status.
Going pro and joining the Cultural Combine
Would put us in a different league again.
As amateurs, of course, we do
Our share of the usual stuff —
Wars, genocides, atrocity camps and slaughterhouse regimes.
But do it free.
As yet,
We don't get paid for it.
Going pro would add
Pain amplifiers to every nation's budget.
But,
On our shoe strings,
At the low-tech end of the scale,
Our Infliction Quotient is surprisingly developed.
Amazing, when you think about it,
What you can do with
Dogs,
Pliers,
Electrodes,
At simple bed frame vertical on a wall
And a bath of water.
That said,
As torturers go,
We're nowhere near the top.
We don't have the requisite education,
The ten-year courses
On skinning folk alive.
Our best inflictors are often not much worse
Than a worst-case dentist.
Our gulags, similarly, are amateurish.
Our prisons are mere playpens compared to Mortis Vorbis
Where the living rock
Wrecks the incarcerated in the loving vice
Of twenty solar cycles,
Twenty cycles of slow compression
To accomplish the last wet whimper of annihilation.
In the realms of the commonplace, then,
The billions
Easily surpass our millions.
Still,
We have a boutique niche
In things unique.
Baklava, for instance,
Is found on no other planet.
Golf
Is our personal perversion.
My mother's quilt
Is sui generis,
The Great Wall of China
Spilling in a tumblefall
To a landslide of flowers.
And the signature of my retina prints,
That, too,
Is a one-off only,
The trashed planets of my eroded eyes
Cratered by cancer wars,
Debauched,
More badly wrecked
Than the world we choose to live in.

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